Edit: Confused about the downvoting hereâis it a âthe Forum doesnât need more of this community dramaâ feeling? I donât really include that much of a personal opinion to disagree with, and I also encourage people to check out Lincolnâs whole response đ€·
Personally, Iâm still struggling with my own relationship to EA. Iâve been on the EV board for a year+ - an influential role at the most influential meta orgâand I donât understand how to use this role to impact EA.
If one of the EV board members is feeling this way and doesnât know what to do, what hope for rank-and-file EAs? Is anyone driving the bus? Feels like a negative sign for the broader âEA projectâ[1] if this feeling goes right to the top of the institutional EA structure.
That sentence comes near the end of a longer, reflective comment, so I recommend reading the full exchange to take in Lincolnâs whole perspective. (Iâll probably post my thoughts on the actual post sometime next week)
The answer for a long time has been that itâs very hard to drive any change without buy-in from Open Philanthropy. Most organizations in the space are directly dependent on their funding, and even beyond that, they have staff on the boards of CEA and other EA leadership organizations, giving them hard power beyond just funding. Lincoln might be on the EV board, but ultimately what EV and CEA do is directly contingent on OP approval.
OP however has been very uninterested in any kind of reform or structural changes, does not currently have any staff participate in discussion with stakeholders in the EA community beyond a very small group of people, and is majorly limited in what it can say publicly due to managing tricky PR and reputation issues with their primary funder Dustin and their involvement in AI policy.
It is not surprising to me that Lincoln would also feel unclear on how to drive leadership, given this really quite deep gridlock that things have ended up in, with OP having practically filled the complete power vacuum of leadership in EA, but without any interest in actually leading.
Hello Habryka! I occasionally see you post something OP critical and am now wondering âis there a single post where Habryka shares all of his OP related critiques in one spot?â
If that does exist I think it could be very valuable to do.
I think this is the closest that I currently have (in-general, âsharing all of my OP related critiquesâ would easily be a 2-3 book sized project, so I donât think itâs feasible, but I try to share what I think whenever it seems particularly pertinent):
I also have some old memos I wrote for the 2023 Coordination Forum I would still be happy to share with people if they DM me that I referenced a few times in past discussions.
Yeah Iâve seen that. I think costly-signalling is very real, and the effort to create something formal, polished and thoughtful would go a long way. But obviously i have no idea what else youâve got on your plate so YMMV
I agree that itâs useful to make this more visible here, thank you!
[Flagging that I only know my own very limited perspective, and I donât expect that Lincoln has done anything wrong, itâs just that I donât see much from where Iâm sitting] I found that statement a bit confusing, because as a person who works at CEA, I barely knew that Lincoln was on the EV board, and I have never heard about him interacting with anyone at CEA (though it seems likely that he has done this and I just donât know about it). I feel like this is complicated because I donât know what the best practices are wrt how involved a board member should be in the details of the organization; I could imagine there might be good reason for board members not to be reaching out to individual employees and pushing their pet causes. But he specifically said he was âworried about the EA Forumâ in his comment, and yet I do not know what any of his views on the Forum are, and I have never heard of him sharing any of his views on the Forum with anyone on the CEA Online Team. So I am left feeling pretty confused. Iâll just say that I have directly reached out and offered to talk with him, because as you can imagine, I am very interested in understanding what his concerns are.
Edit: Confused about the downvoting hereâis it a âthe Forum doesnât need more of this community dramaâ feeling? I donât really include that much of a personal opinion to disagree with, and I also encourage people to check out Lincolnâs whole response đ€·
For visibility, on the LW version of this post Lincoln Quirkâmember of the EV UK board made some interesting comments (tagging @lincolnq to avoid sub-posting). I thought itâd be useful to have visibility of them on the Forum. A sentence which jumped out at me was this:
If one of the EV board members is feeling this way and doesnât know what to do, what hope for rank-and-file EAs? Is anyone driving the bus? Feels like a negative sign for the broader âEA projectâ[1] if this feeling goes right to the top of the institutional EA structure.
That sentence comes near the end of a longer, reflective comment, so I recommend reading the full exchange to take in Lincolnâs whole perspective. (Iâll probably post my thoughts on the actual post sometime next week)
Which many people reading this might feel positive about
The answer for a long time has been that itâs very hard to drive any change without buy-in from Open Philanthropy. Most organizations in the space are directly dependent on their funding, and even beyond that, they have staff on the boards of CEA and other EA leadership organizations, giving them hard power beyond just funding. Lincoln might be on the EV board, but ultimately what EV and CEA do is directly contingent on OP approval.
OP however has been very uninterested in any kind of reform or structural changes, does not currently have any staff participate in discussion with stakeholders in the EA community beyond a very small group of people, and is majorly limited in what it can say publicly due to managing tricky PR and reputation issues with their primary funder Dustin and their involvement in AI policy.
It is not surprising to me that Lincoln would also feel unclear on how to drive leadership, given this really quite deep gridlock that things have ended up in, with OP having practically filled the complete power vacuum of leadership in EA, but without any interest in actually leading.
Hello Habryka! I occasionally see you post something OP critical and am now wondering âis there a single post where Habryka shares all of his OP related critiques in one spot?â
If that does exist I think it could be very valuable to do.
I think this is the closest that I currently have (in-general, âsharing all of my OP related critiquesâ would easily be a 2-3 book sized project, so I donât think itâs feasible, but I try to share what I think whenever it seems particularly pertinent):
https://ââwww.lesswrong.com/ââposts/ââwn5jTrtKkhspshA4c/ââmichaeldickens-s-shortform?commentId=zoBMvdMAwpjTEY4st
I also have some old memos I wrote for the 2023 Coordination Forum I would still be happy to share with people if they DM me that I referenced a few times in past discussions.
Yeah Iâve seen that. I think costly-signalling is very real, and the effort to create something formal, polished and thoughtful would go a long way. But obviously i have no idea what else youâve got on your plate so YMMV
I agree that itâs useful to make this more visible here, thank you!
[Flagging that I only know my own very limited perspective, and I donât expect that Lincoln has done anything wrong, itâs just that I donât see much from where Iâm sitting] I found that statement a bit confusing, because as a person who works at CEA, I barely knew that Lincoln was on the EV board, and I have never heard about him interacting with anyone at CEA (though it seems likely that he has done this and I just donât know about it). I feel like this is complicated because I donât know what the best practices are wrt how involved a board member should be in the details of the organization; I could imagine there might be good reason for board members not to be reaching out to individual employees and pushing their pet causes. But he specifically said he was âworried about the EA Forumâ in his comment, and yet I do not know what any of his views on the Forum are, and I have never heard of him sharing any of his views on the Forum with anyone on the CEA Online Team. So I am left feeling pretty confused. Iâll just say that I have directly reached out and offered to talk with him, because as you can imagine, I am very interested in understanding what his concerns are.